In the mid 1980s, The Ian Potter Foundation supported a new approach to land management in Western Victoria - the Potter Farmland Plan. The resulting project saw the development of a series of demonstration sites that illustrated a variety of resource protection work on fifteen working farms in the Hamilton region. The project helped create the Landcare movement in Australia. In 2005, archives relating to the Potter Farmland Project including film canisters began to surface. Enthusiasm to find out and understand what was the Plan's legacy, grew. In 2006, the Foundation funded RMIT University to carry out an evaluation of the project: Potter Farmland Project - Past, Present and Future.

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In a major initiative in 2006 The Ian Potter Foundation allocated $10M to a medical research project that will see the:

• amalgamation of the Brain Research Institute, the Howard Florey Institute and the National Stroke Research Institute to form a new neuroscience entity, the Florey Neuroscience Institutes (FNI) with staff and student numbers of almost 500, and a budget close to $40M per annum;
• development of two new research facilities; one at the University of Melbourne's Parkville campus (12,400m2) and the other at the Austin Hospital in Heidelberg (4,200m2); and
• co-location of the Mental Health Research Institute of Victoria and elements of the new institute (FNI), formed through the amalgamation noted above, in the new research facility at Parkville.

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$186,950 over six years for the support and evaluation of the Chances for Children Mentoring Program

The Program was established by Mallee Family Care in 2001 as a local response to economic and social concerns in the region. The program seeks to address the problems of young people who, because of financial worries, struggle to participate in and complete secondary and tertiary education, and fulfil their potential.

Now in its sixth year, the Chances for Children Mentoring Program has supported close to 430 young people, and currently has 70 recipients studying at tertiary level, and 22 matches between mentors and mentees in Sydney, Adelaide, Canberra, Melbourne and Bendigo.

Further funding has allowed Mallee Family Care to commission an evaluation to explore what it is doing well and what could be done better. This will lead to enhancements of the program, and ultimately to improved outcomes for the recipients of the Chances opportunities. In late 2008 the dissemination of the results of the evaluation will complete the cycle, paving the way for the replication of the program in other agencies.

Pictured: Mentors from Ernst & Young, Melbourne (Professional Services Firm) with a Chances recipient.

The Anangu Pitjantjatjara Lands are located in north west of South Australia. The Nganampa Health Council is an Aboriginal community controlled health service that works with a population of approximately 3,000 Aboriginal people across an area the size of Victoria. The Foundation has supported the Nganampa Health Council since 1996 when a major grant of $620,000 was made towards the Child Health Program. Since that time, projects have also supported maternal and child health care and babies that have failed to thrive. A report on these projects is attached.

Nganampa Health Council Report
(452kb PDF Document)